The poem Burn Ward by B.H. Fairchild captivated me when we first read it in class. The poem is so beautiful in a dark sense. I enjoy the fact that an abstraction is being described by concrete ideas. “Empathy was an insult” could also be looked at when the nurse calmly “pours the gasoline on like a balm”, in order for her to understand how the patients in the burn ward were feeling she did the same to herself, which could also be considered an insult because the people in the burn ward did not elect to be put in that situation but the nurse did, so now that she has the ability to empathize, her empathy is insulting to the other patients who are going through the same situation. The fact that “a kind of fog or frozen lake lay between her and the patient, far away” is the state of limbo that is between the two forms of consciousness and being. The idea that the nurse is “lost and searching in the frozen dark” is describing the place in the journey where she is at in order to be able to truly feel the empathy for the patients.
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